In North America, internet content providers (ICPs) such as Google and others generated a wave of optical spending at a handful of vendors including Adva, BTI, and Infinera, altogether accounting for an estimated $40 million surge in 2Q14

The 1st half of 2014 brought another huge flood of 100G WDM shipments by Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Huawei, and Infinera

Ciena’s and Infinera’s North American optical revenue grew rapidly on a year-over-year basis in 2Q14, while Fujitsu’s and Alcatel-Lucent’s decreased.

“While the term ‘tier-1’ is traditionally associated with the incumbent operators of Europe and RBOCs in North America, it is now qualitatively clear that tier-1 spending growth is coming from the competitive dark fiber and internet exchange carriers. These carriers, as well as vertically-integrated internet content providers (ICPs), provide a growing portion of core internet connectivity and intra-datacenter capacity,” notes Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for carrier transport networking at Infonetics Research.